The opening scene in “Ten Cent Night,” Chicago-based playwright Marisa Wegrzyn’s zestily written, impeccably acted dysfunctional family tragicomedy, is a classic piece of Americana.
It’s Monday night in the spring of 1973, and in a shabby New Orleans bar, Roby Finley, a sardonic, twentysomething singer-songwriter, is sassily talking back to her mostly drunk audience. She also is refusing to play the song that years earlier had put her father, country singer Hewitt Finley, on the musical map.
“TEN CENT NIGHT”
RECOMMENDED
When: Through Oct. 26
Where: Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago
Tickets: $25-$30
Phone: (312) 633-0840
Roby (a wonderfully raucous Anna Carini), who bears a certain resemblance to Janis Joplin, is pretty much penniless and homeless at the moment. But it’s not long before Danny (the eloquent if silent Joshua Rollins), a handsome deaf mute, invites her to crash in his upstairs apartment. It’s also not long before she drinks herself into a rage, gets handcuffed to a metal folding chair by the cops, grabs a big wad of Danny’s money (which she plans to use help save her younger sister’s life), and hitchhikes, courtesy of the conveniently available “businessman” Roscoe (the canny Freeman Coffey), home to Burkeville, Texas.
How’s that for fast-traveling? And all this happens just part of the way into the first of the play’s three acts (and nearly three hours) of running time. Look at it this way: The motherless Finley family has enough twisted history to give the Weston clan in Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” a good run for its money.
In fact, by the time Roby arrives home, much has happened. Her father has committed suicide. Her far from identical twin sister, Dee (Maura Kidwell, a lovely actress who beautifully limns her character’s awakening), has left her teaching job in Dallas to oversee the family’s younger siblings, another set of fraternal twins —16-year-old Holt (deft playing by Ian Daniel McLaren), and his sister, Sadie (the wonderfully natural Lauren Patten), who suffers from a serious heart ailment. More crucially, Dee wants to nail down the royalty rights to her dad’s one big hit song, though she has some serious legal competition from the town’s still seductive top prostitute, Lila (Morgan McCabe, whose mature, easy sexiness is ideal for the role).
Although Wegrzyn’s incest-fueled story easily stretches credibility at times, this is a playwright with a true gift for dialogue, a genuine talent for creating fully playable characters, and a feel for the way physical action can underpin language to create real energy in a play. In addition, her blackly comic sense of humor never fails her.
A few good cuts to the text would not be a bad thing at all here. But director Richard Shavzin has expertly modulated the volatile scenes with the more poignant, intimate ones, and his uniformly gifted cast acts the stuffings out of this play. A first-rate way to herald the start of the Chicago Dramatists’ 30th anniversary season.